• Question: What is the meaning of space

    Asked by to David, Johanna, Linda, Tamas, Tom on 13 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: David Davila

      David Davila answered on 13 Jun 2014:

      Wikipedia’s answer: “Space is the boundless three-dimensional extent in which objects and events have relative position and direction.”

      My Answer: “?? I have no idea??”

      All I know is space has an up/down, left/right, and forward/backward (that’s what wikipedia means by 3 dimensional), and that as far as we know, it goes on forever (which is what ‘boundless’ means and also gives me a headache when I try and figure that out)

    • Photo: Linda Cremonesi

      Linda Cremonesi answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      This question is very philosophical and it’s open to different answers actually.

      What do you mean by “space”?

      David gave a great answer about the space around us and how we measure it. There are nonetheless different meanings to this word.

      If you mean out space, the NASA defines space as anything going from the Earth to the “end” of the observable universe (more or less 14 billions light year from us, with a light year being the distance travelled by light in a year, just to give you an idea of how big that is, the distance Earth-Sun is 6-7 light minutes! So multiply that by 87600 and you get 1 light year… now 14 billion of those! :D)

      Space is not only that though.
      In general, a space is defined by a set of axes. If you can put some quantities on axes, those axes define a space. We usually put three distances on axes at 90 degrees to each other, but a space can also be a group of kids and a scale to measure their weight, so that you can put kid A before kid B and so on …

      I hope that was not too confusing though! :/

    • Photo: Thomas Smith

      Thomas Smith answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      I don’t know much about space as in “outer-space”, but what I find really cool is that almost everything is space. The atoms and molecules that make up everything we know, including you and me are 99.999999999999% space!! If we were to remove all the space from everything that makes the Earth, our planet would be about 300 metres across (about the size of Wembley stadium).

Comments